New more "helpful" internal linking causing SERP & traffic drop?
-
Still dealing with the weird traffic drop on my website.
I have removed a bunch of old links from a defunct blog, 301 thin pages, added text to remaining pages.
I'm still stumped.
So awhile ago I freshened up my website and thought I was "helping people" by making sure they could CONTACT the studio more easily... I added more links to the "contact page" I thought this would help conversions...This changed the number of links to my entire site....Would this be the problem with my ranking/traffic drop?
-
I saw that video, yes it is a good one.
Interesting theory about the new "spam search queries" I can see that might be an issue with some sites, I'm not sure it is with mine.
There is something called "pink filter" that I have heard of that if google determines your website to be porn, it will not allow it when safesearch is on.
According to theory if I have not been hit by the "pink filter" I am not labeled porn and should not have my rankings dropped. It does look like Google is changing, I'll keep this in mind.
-
Well said! That's exactly what I was thinking and hoping... That if my idea is not the problem, maybe a real geek with chime in and fix it. Anyway, here goes...
There has been some new additions to Google's algo announced just a few days ago. Emphasis on "Announced", who know but Matt Cutts on how long it has actually been active, right?
They (Google) have started targeting anything that "they consider" bad, misused, search terms. Two such terms are "PayDay Loans" and anything that "They Consider" to be of a Pornographic nature.
Although your site is a classy photo studio for private "Intimate" photography and not a porn site, it does have semantic terms on the site that "They May Consider" worth lowering just a little.
Below is a link from which I got this info and formed this theory. This is probably not the problem since I'm not a big-shot and no big-shots have mentioned it, or they "have" mentioned it but found out to not be the issue. But I'm having fun with the exchange and hope to learn more myself... Just like you said above.
Here's the link (I hope)
-Gary.
Oops! I meant to add this quote from the page,
Google has officially launched a new search update to target “spammy queries” such as [payday loan], pornographic and other heavily spammed queries
-
Geek away....
If this was a simple problem with one simple answer I would have fixed it 4 months ago
I've had lots of suggestions and lots of bits of help.
I'm always glad for more, if your suggestion does not work, someone will pipe in and we all learn from it.
Here is another thread that has more data too to help you out.
http://moz.com/community/q/web-traffic-tanked-not-penguin-nor-panda-i-am-stumped
What do you see?
-
Sorry to see your rankings going down. It's obviously not the "shake down" thing I was referring to. However...
I looked at your site after looking at your graph and think I may have found something that could possibly be a contributing factor to your rankings issue.
In my home town I'm a seo big-fish, but here on "The Moz", I'm just a wee lil minnow, so I do not claim to be an SEO Jeenyus outside my physical area. That being said,
Do you mind if I share with you what I think I see to be a possible issue? I don't want to offend you or anyone by coming across as a self proclaimed super-geek, this is why I'm asking.
-Gary.
-
Fascinating theory, but this has been a slow steady decline since March.
Not an instant drop.
Here is an awesome graph of Jan to now.
http://www.bayareaboudoir.com/capture2.jpg
I erased all my stats Jan 1st from previous years.
But they had been slowly climbing.
-
I admit that I don't know your whole situation. But based on my own experience with Local SEO I can say this...
I can very often count on Google to Severely Drop the ranking of the site and or the individual site-page shortly after I do a medium to large amount of SEO Tweaking on the given client site.
Personally I call this "The Google SEO Shake Down" (not sure where I got that term). I don't know if they do this on purpose, but it is predictable like clock-work, so I can only assume there really is something to this "Google SEO Shake Down" idea.
This DROP In Ranking only lasts a few days to a week or so (for me so far).
If your ranking problem has been less than two or three weeks, I would suggest to just stop all your activity and play the waiting game with Google for 5 days to as much as 3 weeks (usually 4 to 7 days, but does vary). If this is the "SEO Shake Down", your site will pop right back up. However, if this has been going on for over 3 weeks, I'd think there is a more serious problem.
Parting Thought:
I frame this "SEO Shake Down" in my own mind like this... Google does this in order to see if there is an SEO spammer that may panic and throw a bunch of spammy SEO tactics at the site. This has worked well for me so far without fail! When I see a big dip in ranking just after doing some SEO tweaking I WILL always stop and wait... So far, the rankings have always came back.
I hope this helps to shine just a little more light on your situation. No one has taught me this, I'm only speaking from my own personal experience alone. But since this so far has been absolutely 100% predictable, I figured it wouldn't hurt to share.
-Gary.
Up Date: I forgot to mention that the "SEO Tweaking" mentioned above is "On-Page" SEO only. OFF-SITE back linking may be a different beast all together! Cool?
-
Update:
I just went through and fixed the last of the 404 errors with 301.
I also changed the internal linking structure to have more links going to the home page and not to the contact page.
I hope this helps.
I'd love some more input on this issue.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Are slides how's etc the new Splash Pages?
I just did SEO audits of approx 50 websites in the tourism sector. Nearly all had poor Google Pagespeed ratings, partly down to that, among other factors. I also feel that slideshows,, large images and videos in headers are poor for usability. I say get the content people need to engage with in front of them asap Are there any stats or studies that can provide insight on this? I've been telling those with these designs to keep an eye on bounce rates and let that guide them
Web Design | | anndonnelly0 -
Should Blog Category Archive URLs be Set to "No-Index" in Wordpress?
It appears that Google Webmaster Tools is listing about 120 blog archives URLs in Google Index>Index Status that should not be listed. Our site map contains 650 pages, but Google shows 860. Pages like: <colgroup><col width="464"></colgroup>
Web Design | | Kingalan1
| http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/category/manhattan-office-space | With Titles Like: <colgroup><col width="454"></colgroup>
| Manhattan Office Space Archives - Metro Manhattan Office Space | Are listed when in the Rogerbot crawl report for the site. How can we remove such pages from Google Webmaster Tools, Index Status? Our site map shows about 650 pages, yet Google show these extra pages. We would prefer that they not be indexed. Note that these pages do not appear when we run a site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com search. The site has suffered a drop in ranking since May and we feel it prudent to keep Google from indexing useless URLs. Before May 650 pages showed on the Webmaster Tools Index status, and suddenly in early June when we upgraded the site the index grew by about 175 pages. I suspect the 120 blog archives URLs may have something to do with it. How can we get them removed? Can we set them to "No-Index", or should the robot text be used to remove them? Or can some type of removal request be made to Google? My developers have been struggling with this issue since early June. The bloat on the site is about 175 URLs not on the site map. Is there any go to authority on this issue (it is apparently rather complicated) that can provide a definitive answer? Thanks!!
Alan0 -
Website design chnage and massive traffic drop?
I changed my Drupal theme to "Bootstrap 3" and now my traffic is down 50% gradually in past 5 days, can this be theme related? Answers to checks below : 1). There were no redirects involved, I just flipped a switch and changed theme for my Drupal blog. 2). No issues reported by Google WMT except the fact that impressions fell, see stat images for comparison at - http://imgur.com/a/5PssH#0. 3). site:mysiteurl.com shows healthy "About 201,000 results". 4). Checked slow loading times and browser issue, nothing there. 5). It's not a seasonal drop. Pls. suggest what else should I focus upon to find the reason. @Prateek_Chandra where can I share my analytic report with you privately. I can also enable guest access to my account for you to have a look.
Web Design | | techdna11 -
Nav / Sitemap Question. Using a "services" page vs just linking directly to individual service page?
Okay, so our company offers video production, web design, and web marketing services. While we do offer these services individually, our goal is to get our clients to integrate these services together. Our nav is currently like so : home - about - video - web design - web marketing - blog - contact Now I've seen businesses and agencies also use a nav with a "services" button instead of listing out their service offerings (if they have more than 1, like us). The services button usually links to a category page or has a drop down with links to the company's individual services. I'm wondering if there is any benefit to having a main services page like this and linking to the individual pages off of it (video ,web design, marketing, etc). Or if we should just keep it the way we have it now (since we've already got some page authority on the individual service pages). I know this may not be the most important aspect of our site and we may be over-thinking it but any thoughts/ideas would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
Web Design | | RenderPerfect0 -
Does Google follow links inside a <noscript>tag?</noscript>
I'm looking at making an embedable calculator and asking users to embed it to their website. I had the idea of using javascript to include the calculator which would also conatain a text link back to my site in order to gain some back links. If it's possible Google won't see the link (as they may not execute the javascript), is it safe to place the link in the <noscript>tag? If so, Will it be indexed and will Page Rank be passed?</span></p> <p>Thanks in advance for your answers. </p> <p>Anthony</p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><br /></span></p></noscript>
Web Design | | BallyhooLtd0 -
Linking to an image with the keyword in the title and alt tags.
Hi guys, Just thought I'd ask for opinions about an ecommerce catalog I'm working on. I don't know if it's even worth worrying about, but here's the scenario. Let's say I'm linking to a category called 'Sale' using an image, I have the title tag of the link as 'Sale', the image title is also 'Sale' as well as the alt tag. The HTML looks like this: Sale The page itself is: http://www.fashionbasicsonline.com/catDisplay So my question is, do you think I'm stuffing the keyword in too many times there? It's CMS driven so I could have the alt tag as 'Sale Products' or one of the titles as 'Sale Catalog' perhaps, do you think there would be a benefit in doing that? Maybe it's microoptimisation and I should be looking at other low hanging fruit, but I'm just trying to come up with the best scenario. Would love to hear what you think. Cheers, Bruce p.s. Looking forward to meeting as many people as possible at MozCon next week 🙂
Web Design | | bruce_werdschinski0 -
Link Pages/Directory
Hello, What is best practise for dealing with alot of links. I was thinking of breaking them download to alphabet pages i.e. all A on one page etc... BUT should I then make the links clickable on this list OR that they load to a sub company page which has a clickable link to there website.
Web Design | | JohnW-UK0 -
Can "poor" subdomains drop PR of the root domain?
The page rank of my company's website has dropped from a 6 to a 4 over the past year or so. In that time, we implemented subdomains for development sites to show clients progress on their websites. I noticed that our "dev" sites are being indexed while in development and my question is, will Google drop pagerank of our root domain purely off of these "dev" subdomains? Example - our site is www.oursite.com Dev site - development1.oursite.com I just began investigating the drop and this came to my mind yesterday but am not too sure what type of impact these non-credible subdomains will have on our root domain. Any thoughts?
Web Design | | ckilgore0